At Amazon's re:Invent shindig in Vegas, the company announces a host of new features for its public-cloud service. Support for Docker and big databases are the highlights, but there's also something opaque about Lambda functions.

After Google went all-in on Docker with Container Engine, it was only a matter of time before...Amazon unveiled the EC2 Container Service (ECS). … [It] uses the existing infrastructure of EC2 instances [for] Docker-ized apps [which] can be launched and managed in clusters of EC2 instances that span multiple Availability Zones. ... A set of containers, their requirements, and their behaviors can be defined by way of a JSON file or a Task Definition. … ECS constitutes a shot at rival cloud services, notably Google and Microsoft, adding container support. But Amazon also is taking aim at stand-alone Linux vendors [that] have been reinventing their respective distributions to become more container-centric. ... Amazon wants customers to launch containers directly in EC2...albeit at the cost of being more dependent on the Amazon way. MORE

What happened in Vegas? Tim Anderson stayed in Vegas:

Speaking at the web bazaar's Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, Vogels was joined on stage by Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. … Think of Docker as diet virtualization: it lets developers package up software environments into boxes and deploy them on Linux. ... A cluster using the new service can scale from a single VM to thousands of instances across multiple Amazon availability zones for resilience. [ECS] is free, which makes sense since it encourages EC2 use. … Microsoft's Azure cloud can run Linux Docker containers, and Google has also announced Docker integration, so in one sense Amazon is late to the party, but at least it has a comprehensive service...in preview mode. MORE

What else happened in Vegas? Joab Jackson justifies the hype:

With Wednesday's preview release of a new database service called Aurora, Amazon Web Services claims to have supercharged the open source MySQL. ... Aurora was designed to offer the high performance...reliability, and scalability characteristics...of a commercial...RDBMS. … Aurora could also eliminate many of the thorny setup and maintenance issues that come with running a RDBMS, [which is] no small feat. ... Amazon claimed it can [do] 6 million inserts [and] up to 30 million queries...per minute. … Aurora offers an exact replica of the MySQL interface, though it is actually powered by a new proprietary database engine...that runs on top of Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS). ... Aurora can detect a database failure and recover in less than a minute. ... In the case of a permanent failure, Aurora can automatically failover. … Amazon is also pitching Aurora as a way for enterprises to escape the lock-in from commercial database vendors, such as Oracle. ... It will cost $0.29 per hour for each large instance. MORE

Anything else, Paul Krill?

Amazon Lambda [is] a new way to build applications and run them in the cloud by leveraging lambda functions. … [It] offers a zero-administration compute platform, so developers don't have to deal with EC2 instances. Functions are written in Node.js; code is uploaded; and context information, specifying the execution environment...is specified to Amazon Lambda to create a new function. … Lambda involves a fine-grained pricing model. ... A free tier also is available, including 1 million free requests [and] 3.2 million [CPU] seconds...per month. MORE

Hmm, clear as mud. Meanwhile, Ben Kepes was wined and dined by Amazon:

The public cloud computing market is Amazon’s to lose. It is by no means a zero sum game and there are a number of other players who will be important in the space, but it would be a brave analyst that would bet against AWS continuing to hold the lion’s share of the market. MORE

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